Methodological tutorial evaluates five approaches for handling multi-arm trials in pairwise meta-analyses across three datasets, indicating practical strategies to avoid unit-of-analysis errors.
Systematic reviewers conducting pairwise meta-analyses sometimes encounter multi-arm studies. To include these studies, and to avoid a unit-of-analysis error, often two or more arms are combined or the control arm is split. In this tutorial, we present 5 different approaches that can be used. Particularly, we present a novel approach (method 4) that to the best of our knowledge has not been presented before. We demonstrate their application on 3 selected data sets, discuss their scope of application and their advantages and limitations, and give recommendations.
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Rücker et al. (2017) studied this question.
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